Human Behaviour
Human
The universal psychology lane. Stories about how people relate to one another, themselves, and the world — written for readers who are curious about why we behave the way we do. Sister section to Space Psychology.
Psychology
The more I work with AI, the less interested I am in whether it's conscious and the more interested I am in what happens to human consciousness around it
Human Behaviour
Neuroscientists found a region of the brain specialized for recognising faces that activates in as little as 50 milliseconds and it develops even in people who have been blind since birth
Human Behaviour
Stonehenge is widely known as one of the oldest monumental stone structures in the world, but hunter-gatherer societies in southeastern Turkey built circles of T-shaped limestone pillars 6,000 years earlier, weighing up to 50 tonnes each and predating the human invention of agriculture by approximately 4,000 years
Psychology
We talk about anxiety as if it starts in the mind — but for some people, the eyes may be the first place it shows up
Human Behaviour
The 1518 dancing plague of Strasbourg began when Frau Troffea stepped into the street and danced without stopping, drew as many as 400 townspeople into the mania, and later chronicles claimed some died before it ended on its own
Human Behaviour
The Overtoun Bridge in Scotland has seen hundreds of dogs leap from the same parapet since the 1950s, often on clear days from the right side, and one behavioural investigation pointed to the scent of mink below
Human Behaviour
The Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh burned down in 612 BC, but because its 30,000 tablets were made of clay, the fire actually baked and preserved them, and we can read Mesopotamian poetry today because someone tried to destroy it
Human Behaviour
Frances Glessner Lee, a wealthy heiress in the 1940s, built 20 dollhouse-sized crime scenes with hand-stitched curtains and working light bulbs to train homicide detectives, and 18 of her tiny dioramas are still used in forensic training in Baltimore today
Psychology
We have normalised filling every quiet moment with something — podcasts while walking, screens while eating, sound while falling asleep — and the exhaustion most people feel isn't from doing too much, it's from never once letting the mind go quiet
Human Behaviour
In 1938 the average American spent 47 minutes a day doing nothing — by 2026 that number had almost vanished, and researchers say that lost time was never idle, it was when the brain did its most important work
Human Behaviour
Sam Altman said he was 'pretty wrong' about the jobs apocalypse — and 'roughly right' about everything else — four days after OpenAI filed for a trillion-dollar IPO
Human Behaviour
The science of why some people seem to age dramatically slower than others is mostly the science of one thing — cumulative sun exposure — and what looks like good genes in someone's seventies is usually fifty years of quiet sun protection that nobody, including the person, ever consciously planned
Psychology
Thought of the day by Albert Einstein: "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."
Human Behaviour
A new meta-analysis of 27 studies just changed what I'm most afraid of about sugar — it turns out the craving isn't the worst part
Human Behaviour